Ep #350: Being Organized

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 350. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck. 

Well, hello, my empowered leaders. Here we are, 350 episodes into The Empowered Principal® Podcast. Can you believe it? Wow. What a celebration. It’s so fun. This is my favorite thing to do. I love this podcast. And if this is the first time you’ve ever been listening, I hope you reach out and say, hello. I’d love to meet you.

Let me know what’s working with the podcast, what would you like to hear more of? Is there anything that you don’t understand and you’d like me to explain it? Just simply let us know and we will give you everything you need.

So with that said, I want to talk about being organized. This is going to be a very short and sweet episode because I know this time of year, you feel very unorganized. You can feel very overwhelmed and you want to be organized at the beginning of the year, right? So what our brain is going to offer us is that we’re not organized and that we need to get organized. It’s telling you, it’s barking orders at you that you should get organized.

I want you to think about this for a minute. When you believe that you are not organized, you’re going to feel some anxiety. “I’ve got to get organized.” There’s some energy behind that. There is momentum being created, but I want you to see the nuance behind this.

If you’re thinking “I’m not organized and I need to get organized,” it feels like momentum, but it’s actually being fueled from insufficiency. Because you’re saying to yourself, “I’m not organized and I’ve got to get organized. I’m not sufficient, I’ve got to get sufficient. Got to get organized.”

And it’s tricky because it feels like momentum. It feels like you’re telling yourself, “Get busy, get going, create momentum, get into action.” But there is this nuance. Here it is. “I’m ready to sit down and plan with intention because I’m an organized person.” That feels more grounded. It feels calm. It feels like sufficiency. It feels confident. I’m getting organized because I am organized.

I’m going to sit down and plan, and a part of the work that I’m going to do for today is to sit down and get organized because I’m an organized person. It’s organization fueled by organization. I sit down and plan and prepare myself and I get organized because that’s who I am. It’s not panicky or anxiety-ridden, or it’s not this like rush, rush, I’ve got to get it done.

Versus “I have to sit down and plan because I’m not an organized person and there’s so much to do and not enough time and I have to organize, but I don’t have time to organize.” Do you see the difference? You might sit down and organize, but it’s coming from the belief, from the fuel that you are not an organized person.

So I’m going to give you some prompts, some questions to help you identify what organization means to you. So do you identify as an organized person on the regular? Where are you organized in your life and at work? Where are you not organized at life and in work? What does it mean to be organized for you? How do you know that you’re organized? How do you know that you’re not organized? Define this for yourself.

Now, there are different ways to feel and be organized in our lives. You can feel organized in your physical surroundings, you can feel organized in your mind, clarity, calmness, alignment, certainty, groundedness, or you can feel organized emotionally, emotional maturity, emotionally regulated, emotionally competent, emotionally introspective, where you understand what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it.

So when your brain offers to you, “I’m not organized, I need to get organized.” You can ask it, well, first of all, what kind of organization do we need to do here? Is it physical surroundings like my office, my desk, my home, my car? Do I need to get physically organized? And I will tell you that your physical surroundings are a window into the organization internally. So your internal organization is going to be reflected in your external organization.

So if your car is a mess because you’re rushing and your house is a mess because you’re rushing and your office is a mess because you’re rushing. Internally, you’re not organized. You’re not organized mentally or emotionally. You’re not tuning in and cleaning up and getting organized. So, do you feel dysregulated in terms of your organization with physical surroundings, or is it a mental disorganization? Do you feel dysregulated mentally? You’ve got so many thoughts, too much to do, not enough time. 

Do you have clarity in your thoughts, priorities, and actions, or are you spinning out? “I’m overwhelmed. I’m confused. I’m frustrated. I’m in a distraction,” and you’re just bouncing all around from one thing to the next because you have so much going on in your brain and you haven’t slowed down to create a plan of value, that valuable plan I’ve been talking about. 

Check in with yourself. Most likely, if your physical surroundings are a mess, I’m going to guess like we haven’t taken some time to clean up that mental organization and get organized in your mind. This is who I am. This is what I’m doing. These are my priorities. I have a plan in place. This is what I want to experience.

I’m going to design this experience for the year and I want it to be organized. I want to feel organized and different people have different tolerances for organization. There are some people who when you walk into their office, it looks like it’s a mess, but they know where everything is at. They know exactly where to go. They don’t waste time, even though to you it might be, you know, chaos.

For them, it’s organized because they know where it’s at. They’re calm. They know where to find it, what it is, where to look for it, where to put it back. And then there is emotional organization. I know how I’m feeling. I take ownership for my feelings. I’m responsible for how I feel. I check in with myself. I hold space for myself. I allow myself to express my feelings and process my feelings and put closure to my feelings.

Or are you bottling them up, dismissing them, avoiding them, trying to run from them, and they feel very messy and you actually don’t even know how you feel or why you’re feeling it. You feel like you’re on the edge. You ever had that time where you feel like you’re on the edge of an emotion like, “Oh, I feel like I could cry right now, but I can’t, I can’t do it right now. Stuff it down.”

Or, “Oh, I’m feeling really angry right now, but no, can’t do it. Got to run away from it, have to hide, have to do this. I can’t do that.” And it’s sitting inside of you, and it starts to just feel buzzy because there’s no release. The pressure valve hasn’t been released yet on the emotions.

But I will tell you that the most empowered principals, the most organized principals, they check in first. When it comes to organization, is my mind organized? Are my emotions organized? Have I validated my thoughts and feelings? Have I checked in with myself? Am I in a calm, organized state internally? And then I can take action to organize myself externally.

Is your calendar, is your time organized? Is your energy organized? Think about your assets, the different currencies you use, your time, your money, your energy, your attention, focus, all of those things. Something is unorganized. Usually it’s internal, which creates external disorganization.

So here are the steps. Just identify what aspect feels unorganized. Is it your physical surroundings? That’s just a window into the internal disorganization. Then you check in with yourself. Is it your mind and your thoughts? Do you have clarity or confusion? Or is it emotional?

Maybe you’ve gone through something very emotional, but you haven’t given space and time to allow for that, to ground yourself, to regulate yourself, to feel aligned or that dissonance. It’s a really uncomfortable feeling. For me, when I am emotionally unregulated, but I haven’t checked in to regulate myself, I tend to feel restless. There is a restlessness inside of me. It’s kind of a buzzy feeling. I can’t be comfortable, my body responds restlessly, my mind feels restless, it’s not focused.

And normally, when I know myself enough to know that when I’m in that state, there is an emotion that I haven’t acknowledged or allowed or processed. So check in with yourself. Now, if you’re feeling unorganized and you’re telling yourself you have to get organized, ask yourself, why am I feeling unorganized? And what would make me feel organized?

A lot of times we stay unorganized because we think it’s going to take a ton of time, so much time to get organized, but you waste time thinking about how disorganized you are and you spend more time spinning out, thinking about how unorganized you are and how much time it’s going to take to take versus just sitting down and doing it.

So to get organized, it doesn’t take time as much as it takes the willingness to slow down and identify what needs organizing and then having the courage and commitment to organizing it. The hardest thing we do is to allow ourselves to an experience and emotion we don’t want to feel and that we’ve been avoiding for a long time and to question the thoughts that don’t feel good.

When you have thoughts about yourself particularly, opinions, judgments, criticisms that feel terrible, then you’re feeling terrible about yourself. “I’m not an organized person.” You’re not identifying as an organized person. You feel bad about that and then you live that out.

You believe you’re not organized and therefore life continues to feel chronically unorganized. So if you want to identify as an organized principal, you create that organization in your mind and in your emotions. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. Have an amazing week. And I’ll talk to you guys next week. Take good care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.